Why Are We Here, Or: If not Now…When?
Dr. James E. Shaw
Address for the “Day of Commemoration and Change” Ceremony for Columbine High School, April 20, 2000
Littleton, Colorado
Good evening: My remarks are dedicated to all the victims of adolescentcide: children slain in acts of homicide committed by other children. We are a poorer nation bereft of: the leadership they might have provided; the cures they might have discovered; the books they might have written; the verses they might have penned; the songs they might have sung; the journeys they might have taken; and the voices they might have raised. May they rest in peace, for we, the living, must not.
We mourn the horrific deaths of 12 students and a teacher in Littleton, Colorado, and the two teen-aged student shooters who killed them before committing suicide themselves. But in our hours, days weeks, and years of mourning, we must require of ourselves that we do more than grieve over the tragic losses of Littleton’s “bright promises” and the other fallen children in the nation whose young lives and gleaming promise were extinguished when they fell victim to children-terrorists. Columbine High School is regarded by some as the Pearl Harbor of school violence. Yet, there are countless isolated, alienated, confused, depressed and angry children throughout the country who, in the last year, have tried, in their own words, to “out-columbine Columbine.”
Although it is only the second quarter of the new millennium, it is awfully late in the day, to use a figure of speech. We must act with a sense of urgency that gives us a truer perspective of “national security” when seen from the point of view of children so viciously and abruptly denied it. For when our children are not safe, neither, then, are we. Guns killed 75,640 children between 1979 and 1996 and injured over 340,000 more. These statistics mean there were more children who suffered gun injuries than Vietnam war veterans injured in combat.
Currently, every 48 hours in America, 26 children—an entire classroom full—are killed by guns. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that since the Columbine High School tragedy last April 20, guns have killed 4,745 children. Death’s clock continues ticking and, at the rate of 0.54 deaths per hour—as we are comfortably ensconced here in the Hilton Hotel—I must inform you that 10 children will not be safely tucked into their beds tonight or any night hereafter. By midnight, tonight, three more will have joined them in death, too.
What kind of inspiration, motivation, or direction do we need to make us protect our children against violence at home, in school, and in their communities? For the past nine years, since 1991, I have been studying what I call “adolescentcide,” a word I coined and mentioned earlier, meaning the phenomenon of children killing children. I spent four of those nine years inside the prison cells of boys and girls incarcerated for murder and homicide. And during those four years, 103 children tracked the trail for me as they graphically described their odysseys from life at home to life in prison. Despite their wide diversity of ethnicity, economic status, and social standing, all of these children were “united” in one respect: They had shown a dominant preference for violent behavior. They had all chosen to “solve” their problem by pointing a gun at “it”—usually another kid.
I figured that by talking to these kids, over and over, they might tell me the ways parents and teachers could have made a difference in their lives. You see, in 1991, when I began my research, in the country’s 75 largest counties, 370,424 juvenile defendants were formally processed through the juvenile courts; 22% of them were murder defendants, and 1,638 of these were prosecuted as adults! As a former teacher who had been threatened, attacked, whose classroom exterior had been strafed by gunfire, and who had to command my elementary school charges, playing outside, to take duck-and-cover maneuvers whenever screeching tires and gunshots were heard, I saw, with my own eyes, school yards being turned into grave yards.
A number of the incarcerated children I interviewed had been cradled in a culture of violence. Resorting to it was as natural as watching their mother, sister, aunt, or grandmother getting smacked around and brutalized by some insecure, ignorant barbarian, otherwise known as husband, lover or boyfriend. Six of “my” kids—as I came to view the 103 children over the years—had killed an immediate blood-relative.
Other children who talked to me from their prison cells and from their hearts, claimed to have grown up in “good” homes where they neither witnessed nor personally experienced violence or brutality. Yet they told stories of verbal and emotional abuse, and lives so bleak, that they desperately wished they could have lived away from their families or, simply, not lived at all.
Still, other children had been physically beaten and tortured, on a regular basis, almost from the time they cut their first teeth. Years of such child abuse conditioned them to be chronically angry, depressed, and waiting for an opportunity to avenge themselves. One of these admitted that, even today, she feels relaxed only “when I see the sight of my own blood.” That had always been her personal signal that whoever was beating her, would finally stop. Today, she regularly injures herself to the point of bleeding.
Still, others of my incarcerated children population stated the coldness, isolation, and indifference that passed for “parenting” in their homes “freaked” them out, drove them “up the wall,” “filled me with hate,” and used other expressions to mean they had been going insane because of the lack of love, warmth, and caring from adults responsible for their care and maintenance: their own parents.
These 103 children told me they killed because they felt alienated, isolated, unloved, unlovable, depressed. They also had experienced verbal, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse by an adult, or some other form of adult betrayal. And they had ready access to alcohol, drugs, and…guns! In 1995 4,236,942 firearms were manufactured. These included pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and other miscellaneous firepower. Most of these weapons have nothing whatsoever to do with hunting animals. On the contrary, it is people, including children, whose lives have been snuffed out by this tonnage of firearms.
Gunfire killed 4,643 infants, children, and teens in 1996—134 murdered before their 10th birthday. More children under 10 years of age are killed each year by guns than police are killed in the line of duty or U.S. soldiers killed by hostile action. The Centers for Disease Control reports that American children under 15 are 12 times more likely to die from gun violence than their peers in 25 other industrialized nations combined.
As a nation, we have expended Herculean amounts of time, money and effort preparing to meet the twenty-first century by immunizing our ubiquitous computerized-technology systems against the notorious “Y2K Bug.” However necessary that crusade might have been, the larger issue is: How much time, money and effort are we prepared to continue to pour into the real “Y2K’s—Years 2000 Kids—who possess the power to change the course of American history forever? As the Honorable William Bennett, former White House Cabinet member stated, it is only young twenty-first century America that can legitimately be called “history’s most violent ‘civilized’ nation.”
How much longer are we going to put up with the constant magnification and glorification of violence and guns on our movie, television, Internet, and video game screens? Who was asleep at the switch when guns became the only unregulated consumer product in America? Why do we regulate toy guns, but not the real guns that kill a child every two hours? Why are real guns so easy for children to find…in many cases, as easy as toy guns? How much more child carnage and future “Day of Commemorations…” will occur before we decide enough is enough?
Will today be the day when parents across the nation demand changes in the public education format so that mental detectors become as important as metal detectors? If not now, when? Tests for depression, specialized counseling, and behavior monitoring might prove to be positive interventions for those students who are emotionally armed and dangerous.
Is this the day we realize and accept that security cameras take fine external pictures but fail to photograph what is in a student’s heart or what is lacking in his character? If not today, when?
A 1993 report published by the American Psychological Association stated: “There is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior. Children’s exposure to violence in the mass media, particularly at young ages, can have harmful lifelong consequences.”
Television, in many homes is the electronic fireplace. I would strongly advise parents whose television sets have grown up with, and are now members of, the family to analyze the hours spent in front of the tube versus the minutes spent in real, heart-to-heart conversation. Then, turn that around: Spend minutes in front of the tube but hours in each other’s faces involved in engaging talks, stimulating discussions, and resolutions to problems.
Since last year, how many of you parents, or other parents across America, have increased the amount of time you talk to your children about moral principles, right and wrong behavior, good and bad choices? If you leave it up to the schools to do it, you’re copping out…big time. Moral education, moral direction, and moral intelligence begin at home. It has always been that way, and it will always be that way. It seems that schools would rather teach the right and wrong of Driver Training, or the right and wrong about fouling in basketball or clipping in football, than teach children good, safe, sane behaviors based on the “M” word: Morality. Some schools think that teaching morality is teaching religion. Yet, few people are ever hear complaining about how “straight-laced” and moral the Driver Training rules of the road are, or how strangulating the character-and-moral-development regulations that govern school athletics and other team sports are.
Is there anybody complaining about the smear that 6-year old Elian Gonzalez’s father made about American schools on “60 Minutes” last Sunday? Mr. Gonzalez, a self-admitted communist who embraces the communist regime of Fidel Castro, in a country where bread lines are so long they have “Stop” and “Go” signs and modern medicine got lost in the Bay of Pigs, said American schools are where kids go to get shot. Now, wait a minute. We don’t like to use the words “moral” or “moral education” because they are too closely-aligned with religion, with God. Yet, all of the nation’s state constitutions—and that’s 50—unabashedly acknowledge and otherwise refer to God, in reverential, devout and gracious terms. Are we going to declare those state constitutions unconstitutional?
Mr. Gonzalez’s belief system prohibits that he acknowledge a Supreme Being. Our country was built on freedom of religion. Yet, somehow, that cherished concept has eroded into freedom from religion—or moral teachings, or spiritual guidance. The result is a moral vacuum that breeds immoral children whose god is a gun. And from a backward country where it takes people like Mr. Gonzalez an hour-and-a-half to watch “60 Minutes”, he, who professes no belief in a Supreme Being, calls it like he sees it: “American schools are where kids go to get shot.”
Somebody once asked me if America’s turning its back on—and not fearing—God has put us in the position of now having to fear our very own children, as punishment. That is a very important question. And while I am not suggesting that we turn our schools into seminaries and monasteries, I am suggesting that we begin immediately instituting right-and-wrong concepts, character development frameworks, and life-ethics training in our nation’s kindergarten through 12th-grade school curricula. And some states already have. Incidentally, let’s not throw our hands up and join with Elian Gonzalez’s father in championing Cuba’s educational system.
But what you can do right away is suggest to your school administrators that World History can wait and children ought to be taught how to stop the bloodshed flowing over their modern history today. Tell school leaders that dry Mathematics and arid Algebra might be brought to life if students were repeatedly asked to link raw numbers, equations and theorems to the national daily child homicide death toll.
Tell them also that the Language Arts program might produce more scholarly, articulate, and effective journalists if they were given field assignments in visiting the morgue where juvenile corpses lay; observing court proceedings on juvenile homicide; and interviewing homicide cops in the local precinct.
Don’t forget to tell them that Social Science might be more relevant if students created their own Teen Court, under the watchful eye of a local judge, and heard cases on a variety of campus behavioral infractions, and levied fines and discipline sanctions. If you don’t begin all of this today…when would you?
In the meantime, instill principles of honesty and integrity in your child. Children appreciate knowing what the standard is and reaching it. Knowing right from wrong clears up heir thinking and develops their moral intelligence. Children lacking in moral intelligence do not have the capacity to make moral decisions. If no moral teaching has been instilled in them, there exists a void that will be constantly filled with anti-social thoughts and actions. There is a direct link between a child’s ignorance of life-ethics, his disregard for right and wrong moral behavior, and his decision to kill another child or other human being.
Help your child set clear attainable objectives and thus have the satisfaction of controlling his own future. That’s what really produces genuine self-esteem. Children who lack the capacity for self-love and self-esteem can never realize their full possibilities. One of the most important gifts you can give your child is to teach him to be “response-able”—able to respond.
Teach your child to seek and become aligned with a spiritual purpose. You may find that a church or house of worship can help you to dot his in an organized, efficient, and consistent way. You are the ultimate model for your child, whether you know it or not. You were his first teacher. From you, it is important that he learns there are more good people than bad people and more reasons to be happy and optimistic than sad and sullen.
Teach your child nonviolent communication strategies and peace-building skills. Repeatedly emphasize that a gun or other weapon is never, ever an acceptable alternative to nonviolent interaction and positive communication.
Your child is exposed to you but a fraction of the time, in contrast with his exposure to ideas, people and events outside the family. Try to make each of your interactive moments with him joyful, meaningful, rewarding, and loving experiences. Parents who are in touch with themselves and their loving attitudes and inclinations are more effective parents.
All children who make the decision to kill somebody else are alienated and isolated from important adults in their lives. We must constantly give our children a sense that they are loved and valued and safe. A recent study of students in grades 7-12 showed that teenagers who feel “connected” to their schools and families are less likely to engage in risky or violent behavior. This is hardly a surprise. We cannot underestimate the importance of family, teachers, and faith communities, and we must nurture that feeling of “connectedness” very early. Parents’ voices are the ones children recognize first and fastest. And parents, especially fathers, need to express their love to their children verbally and often. Silence may be all right for strangers, but not for families. Bad kids can happen to good parents, and it is better to take time and lovingly persist in coaxing your son to “talk out” whatever’s on his chest, so he won’t put a bullet into your or somebody else’s chest.
Emotion often drives behavior. Always consult your child’s feelings; how he feels will tell you how he is coping. Children’s emotions are dynamic and their flare-ups illuminate their feelings. Addressing the emotional needs of your child should be a constant priority. Teenagers appreciate and admire parents who patiently stick it out with them, no matter what they throw at their parents, in terms of behavior. Parents who never give up, no matter the emotional “weathers” of their teens, are highly-praised (yes, teens often praise their folks to others), highly-valued and –loved parents.
Parents, you should be able to say to your children:
"I am your parent, you are my child, and I vow, as of this moment and until time is no more, to love you. You are the best part of me. I hold you, hug your, touch you, teach you, and shine my eyes upon you in love. With patience, I joyfully share my strength with you. With kindness and praise, I show you right from wrong, good from bad. When you fall, I gently pick you up and the feather of my kiss brushes your tears away. The rhythm of our hearts is the beat of our love. It is with pride that I am your model of gentleness, your mirror of sensitivity. I am the grownup you will become. You are my joy and it is with total love that I touch and teach you, guide and lead you.
I promise you a home in which your spirits will lift you to newer and greater heights and where you are free to dream and express the full palette of your talents on the canvas of your personality. I will show you how your desire gives you the energy of angels; you will learn to soar with your enthusiasm. I will show you how to live well—with hope and vision, the confidence to climb any mountain, the trust to reach out and touch. You will learn to help others with a heart that heals. For you I must, and will always be, the sum of patience, the temple of goodness, the soft winds and silent springs of compassion.
I will teach you to love life fully, give to others generously and let your light shine. Perfect love replaces fear, and you will learn how to greet each day with love, salute the Universe with joy and thanksgiving, and to let the quiet night comfort your soul. We are one with this gift called Life, and heirs to the blessings of our grand and glorious Universe. The Universe is filled with abundance and I will teach you to desire only good from the Universe and give only good back to the Universe.
You will learn the importance of sharing the blessings the Universe pours upon you. I will teach you to never look back upon yesterday, nor pine away for tomorrow. You will learn that virtue comes from being thankful for the nowness and newness that is today, for it is the gift we call The Present.
You will learn that the mind is a great source of strength, love is the root of your character, and that life is filled with goodness. I promise to let your talents guide, cheer and support you, for that which you love is where your heart is; and where your heart is, there you will thrive. Through peace, you will learn to negotiate; through love, to communicate; and through respect, to articulate. For by giving to others what they need, you thus build the bridge to what you need. Thinking of others is a virtue you will always value. You will learn that laughter is often the best medicine. I promise you days filled with laughter and learning so that your sleep will be filled with dreams of joy. Life is not a lullaby but you will know that your humor is a music that gives life flavor.
You are an important, vital member of this family, a very necessary member of the human race. You help to make family and community strong. From this moment on, until time is no more, I promise to love you.
Thank you for teaching me what the truest treasure in life really is."
While America is not currently at war with any foreign power, we must know—by our presence here—that our children have declared war on each other. There are millions of children who are depending on us—for protection, for guidance, for the basic necessities. Before one more child is lost, we must promise ourselves that we will do all that is necessary to make our homes safer, our children more secure. For home is where the hate is. Children who kill are homegrown. There is no such as unsafe schools, only unsafe homes. Schools are only as safe as the homes they must serve.
Children are throwing the family gun into their school backpacks along with their peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and hauling this lot of problems to school to “share” their pain.
We need to mount an all-out campaign, which the Centers for Disease Control might appreciate: We must vaccinate our children against violence; immunize our children against intolerance; and humanize our children with love. That is the only way we will re-unite the United States in peace.
When a ship capsizes at sea and life boats are heaved overboard, the rule of rescue is “women and children first.” Our great ship of state is capsizing before our very eyes, and our children are drowning in their own bloodshed. When was the last time you heard anybody say, “Children first”? We need to become instantly and actively involved in the greatest rescue effort this country has ever known, saving our children from adolescentcide. Far too many children’s lives are being lost by the love of force, expressed through violence. The only way we can rescue them is with the force of love.
May God save the children. May the nation’s victims of adolescentcide rest in peace, for we, the living, must not. Our mission of saving our children has scarcely begun.
# # #
No comments:
Post a Comment